Peaced out from the office to avoid driving in heavy sleet traffic, so I’m now safely ensconced at home, working away. Leaving the tie on until the work day is over, though. Be safe out there, folks!

Well, this was delicious. Thanks for dinner, @iateoklahoma!

NOVA: The Invisible UniverseThis episode of NOVA made me actually weep. The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most amazing thing humanity has ever done, and Nancy Roman's face should be on money. Watch this.

Wayward Spawn of a Dead Star?It didn't turn out that the first interstellar asteroid detected traveling through our solar system was an alien spacecraft, but 'Oumuamua still is revealing its secrets even as it zooms back out into the galaxy, never to be seen again.

Ring In 2019 in the Kuiper BeltThis NASA preview of the next New Horizons flyby—of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69—has me excited to see humanity once again push the boundaries of exploration.

I first saw this a few years ago captioned thusly: "There are two kinds of people in this world . . ."

That caption has stuck with me as much as the actual .gif has. I think about it a few times a week. Who runs toward their fear? Who wants to ride a rollercoaster, much less jump out of a plane, wrestle alligators, or attend a live taping of Dr. Phil? Not I.

And yet, I've been wrestling with fiction again. The same novel I came a hand's breadth from selling in 2010—God, it's such a long story; buy me a beer—still claws at me, and I've decided I'm going to finish what is now my third rewrite of it as soon as I can, because I want to move on to writing other stories. This one's had its turn, and it needs to get off the swing set.

So I was writing away tonight, and it was one of those kinds of sessions where you're doing a word count after every paragraph—torturous. Nothing seemed to want to come. I'm in a weird sequel spot in the big, creamy middle of the book, about 25,000 words in, and that's where every fictionist eventually gets mired down.

And I was writing out what I knew needed to be the next little bit, and suddenly—I'm not big on plotting much out ahead of time beyond the broadest of strokes, and I don't know how this thing ends yet—a plot development hits me that I didn't know was there. And it has to do with so much of my own trauma, stuff I spent years in therapy processing. And I knew—knew—this was where this story had to go. This was where this story had been begging me to take it all along.

I struggle with fiction in part because I suck at putting my characters in real peril. Oh, but peril beckoned. Peril, in this case, demanded, and I'm ready to oblige. But this means a lot of processing of old, bad stuff for me—stuff I feel pretty settled and okay about but that still isn't pleasant—and I feel a little like both of the two kids in this .gif above.

Run away to a safer, cleaner, more well-lighted room where terrifying dolls fear to tread? Or run at this fucker full-speed and punt it all to shit?